Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday June 10, 2013 @03:29PM
from the round-up dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off his company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco with a short video emphasizing the importance of design, particularly that which evokes some sort of emotional connection such as love or delight. But that sentimental bit aside, this WWDC was all business: huge numbers of developers attend this annual event, packing sessions designed to help give their apps an edge in Apple's crowded online marketplace (some 50 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, Cook told the audience during his keynote). Apple also uses its WWDC to unveil new products or services, attracting sizable interest from the tech press.

This time around, the company introduced Mac OS X 'Mavericks,' which includes 'Finder Tabs' (which allow the user to deploy multiple tabs within a Finder window—great for organization, in theory) and document tags (for easier searching). Macs will now support multiple displays, including HDTVs, with the ability to tweak elements between screens; Apple claims the operating system will also interact with the CPU in a more efficient manner.

On top of that, Apple rolled out some new hardware: an upgraded MacBook Air with faster graphics, better battery life (9 hours for the 11-inch edition, while the 13-inch version can draw 12 hours' worth of power). Apple has decided to jump into the cloud-productivity space with iWork for iCloud, which makes the company's iWork portfolio (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) browser-based; this is a clear response to Office 365 and Google Docs.

And finally, the executives onstage turned back to iOS, which (according to Apple) powers some 600 million devices around the world. This version involves more than a few tweaks: from a redesigned 'Slide to Unlock' at the bottom of the screen, to the bottom-up control panel that slides over the home-screen, to the 'flat' (as predicted) icons and an interface that adjusts as the phone is tilted, this is a total redesign. As a software designer, Ive is clearly a huge fan of basic shapes—circles and squares— and layering translucent elements atop one another."

According to the product page, it sure doesn't look like those are standard GPUs, as well as it looks like they go from dual socket Xeons to single socket, mounted centrally so the entire system would need to be disassembled to replace the CPU, if it is even replaceable.

From the imagery posted on Apple's website, it looks like a Mac Mini++.Apple: Mac Pro [apple.com]

Did you look at the specs or just one photo? 12 Xeon cores, up to 128GB RAM, 2 GPUs w/ 6GB RAM, PCIe SSD, etc - with a single near silent fan in a 10" x 6 1/2" form factor?

I'd never buy one and I'm sure it's going to be absurdly expensive and proprietary - but "nothing pro about it"? Right. Macs have never been made for the home enthusiast upgrader market, and clearly they aren't starting now...

If designed right (and it sounds like a custom-designed 6" impeller fan) 1 big high-quality fan would be a lot more reliable than 4-5 small, crappy OEM fans found in most PCs. It's not like Apple has any reason to cut costs here, this thing is going to cost a mint and have an absurd profit margin, anyway.

If designed right (and it sounds like a custom-designed 6" impeller fan) 1 big high-quality fan would be a lot more reliable than 4-5 small, crappy OEM fans found in most PCs.

Sounds like they took some design cues from SilverStone. They have been using their 180mm "Air Penetrator" fans in a wide variety of applications, and it works pretty well. The FT02 has three of them on the bottom, blowing upward, over a motherboard rotated 90 degrees. (The ports stick out the top and there is a secondary cover to hi

As I said, if your billable rate is $250/hr (and if you're a professional, you're likely billing that out or even higher) and the machine causes you 4 hours of being unusable when you need it for work per year (during business hours - virus infection, screwing around getting some peripheral to work on a PC, chasing down crashes due to a windows bluetooth driver etc - all of which I've dealt with on PCs in the past 12 months) then after 5 years as far as the company is concerned, it has paid for itself.

This is why Linux or in some cases Windows (for example) is a non-starter for many people. If you consider your time to be worthless, great. Some people don't.

If Apple's (rather painfully self-satisfied) slideshow thing [apple.com] is anything to go by, there isn't a single standardized part in the entire computer, with the exception of the RAM, and possibly the CPU, depending on whether they went socketed or BGA.

The two GPU cards are probably PCIe electrically; but the shape certainly isn't compatible, the CPU card is its own animal(one that packs a whole four RAM slots, that's Serious Workstation material right there...), and PCIe-attached SSDs in the mini-PCIe form factor are relatively odd ducks(most that are that size and shape are mSATA, and PCIe direct-attached cards are usually rectangular PCIe 8x cards.

FWIW - have you tried to upgrade a Mac Pro's graphics card in the past? There are unfortunately very very few options [everymac.com] even with the standard connector. I'd bet the situation remains about the same with this newer design.

Actually it looks like with this design there will be NO upgrading video cards. Do you really think any third party is going to design a card for the small section of the market that is the mac pro. At least with the old mac pro they used standard designs, the only difference being the bios.

Yes, I think one or two companies will put in the effort to do it. Even back when Power Mac CPU's required all sorts of custom designs, there were a few companies offering upgrades. The market isn't huge, but it isn't negligible, either.

You can buy plenty of third party options for firewire storage, as well as Thunderbolt. and USB3.
In fact you can have a single Thunderbolt box that will have tons of I/O on it. So it's not going to be the "rats nest" for most people.

The video cards are not standard or (apparently) replaceable. As a Mac Pro user needing an upgrade, this is a deal killer for me. Part of the ROI on a Mac Pro purchase has been the abilty to throw a new card in the box every couple years and keep going. These new machines are going to be obsoleted much faster.

Shape does matter when it comes to cost of manufacturing and so forth. Round is just tricky. It means you either get curved or round boards, or you waste a lot of internal space. It means your older boards aren't reusable. This is basically treating form as more important than function.

Apple knows this and doesn't shy away from it. That's why they continually tweak and change things that are already working just so that people have to buy new accessories. Ie, new laptop last month which also meant tha

None of these boards are curved. The CPU and two GPU's are attached in a triangular arrangement around a triangular aluminum heat-sink. Much of the "wasted space" in the curved areas contains the SSD, RAM, and Thunderbolt/USB/other ports.

Well, why not? C'mon, you can tell us.
It does look nice, and I like the way you can rotate it to get to the i/o on the back. Oh, and that little light that comes on when it's rotated. No need to cuss and go find a flashlight. A little thing, but a nice thing.

The rotation is nice in theory, but notice that the power cable port is right there as well and also rotates with the unit. So this rotation is great when nothing is plugged in. As soon as you start plugging stuff in then either it doesn't rotate or you've got so much extra cabling on your desk that it's a spaghetti nightmare.

One thing you should be happy about... putting all the expansion OUTSIDE of the computer using STANDARDIZED interfaces (Thunderbolt was actually developed by Intel and you can get PC adapters) means that any money you put into expanding a computer will be easily portable to other computer or when you upgrade a computer. This isn't necessarily true with internal cards (think ISA / VESA / PCI / PCIe / PCIx). Also, you don't have to worry about upgrading your computer's power supply or cooling when you add expansion.

That thing needs a handle on top that you can rotate 1/4 turn, hear a hissing noise, and then pull out a long cylindrical CPU core that is all lit up with blue LEDs from a super-cap... On the side of it should be a double digit 7 segment display slowly counting down to 0.

Anyhow... that's a lot faster than any consumer or prosumer storage solutions. It might be a little slow only if you were driving an external video card but the internal cards can handle 3X 4K displays already.

missing the point how are the TB chips linked to the chip set? and does each controller have it's own X4 link?

The TB 2.0 chipsets use a x4 PCIe 2.0 link per controller [anandtech.com]. Guess that means that each pair of two TB ports shares the bandwidth of a controller (6 ports / 3 controllers / 12 PCIe 2.0 lanes total.

Probably not fast enough for external graphics that would outperform the (extremely fast) internal graphics solution but still orders of magnitude more bandwidth than any current external consumer or prosumer storage solution.

Remember that 'Thunderbolt' speed numbers include both the PCIe and the Displayport data channels(and, to the best of my knowledge, the capacity allocation between the video and data channels is fixed, even if only one is being used). By aggregating the previous 4 10Gb channels into two 20Gb channels, they allowed full Displayport 1.2 resolution and expect to bottleneck external storage devices slightly less; but the PCIe side still looks like PCIe 2.0 x4. Not slow; but substantially slower than x8 and x16 PCIe 2.0 and slower still than PCIe 3.

And PCIe 1.0 is well and truly obsolete. PCIe 3.0 is shipping already and we have devices targeted at workstations maxing out PCIe 2.0 x8 links handily. Never mind the latency increases imposed by Thunderbolt.

TB has its place, but as the exclusive means of expansion in a system it is lacking.

On an average day they have 6 foot waves. In winter on a lot of days it gets bigger, though, and it looks really amazing. The big waves are far out on the ocean, so it isn't as impressive to look at as, for example, Waiamea.

Under the new naming convention, Apple employees will be known as Stallions, developers shall be know as Geldings, and the consumers shall be known as Mares. The apple education consumers are called Ponies.

Now that Apple.com is updated, you can find out why - it's a cylinder because the GPUs and CPU are mounted around a central cooling core made from a single piece of aluminum with a single massive fan on top.

It's actually 60% larger than a 120mm fan. Don't forget about that r^2 term. And one larger fan draws more air per minute with lower power and, more importantly, significantly less noise than 4-8 fans.

You must be new here. Every Apple related story posted here draws several times more people who log on just to tell each other how much they hate Apple and how they would never buy an Apple product because they all suck than it draws in Apple Fanboys extolling said products virtue. Any Apple Fanboy that shows his face here gets shredded, it's like throwing a child into a shark pond. The purpose of Apple and Microsoft stores on/. is mostly to goad the hater crowd into boosting click-through rates....

Apple appears to have decided that users just loved the good old days of SCSI-based external enclosure rat's nests accompanying their elegant all-in-ones, and have decided to update the technology accordingly.

Luckily, since external thunderbolt enclosures are alarmingly expensive and totally out of step with the new look, any attempt at expansion shouldn't be a dreadful mess!

Looking at the site [apple.com] - this thing is modular as all hell. Looks like a backplane at the bottom that everything plugs into... upgrade bits and pieces as required or tech progresses. It's kind of a bold thing to do.

They're also banking on PCIe3 being overkill for (current) workstation applications... TB2 being plenty for most use cases. Speaking of cases, expect lots and lots of cylindrical PCI expansion chassis and RAID arrays from third party soon. The old Unix workstation days are back, baby! Daisy-Chain 4 Lyfe! This actually makes sense, as few videographers will want to pop open the case on their editing workstation to add more storage, and special PCI card applications would probably be more at home in its own case with a robust power supply and cooling, anyhow. Sharing a small metal box with a pair of GPUs, high end CPU and some seriously serious RAM can be a little heated.

On the other hand, the gigabit ethernet is unforgivable. It really needs to be dual 10Gbase-T ports in this day and age.

You are not the target audience. They will sell a zillion of these things to Pixar/Disney. A quiet, powerful device you can easily move around and reconfigure by plugging things in and out external devices instead of opening it up. In fact, I'm guessing the fact that they're selling them on the market is probably just to defray the cost of building these for Disney.

Things that caught my eye were (1) iCloud keychain to allow better mobile-system tracking of passwords within the iOS and OS X framework, (2) iBooks on Mac (FINALLY!), (3) some expanded multitasking in iOS 7 (although it's not clear if it's really extended capabilities over iOS 6 or just a spiffier UI), and (4) Airdrop from within iOS 7 to nearby devices. The new Mac Pro line looks sharp, and I definitely lust for one even if I don't need one.

iCloud Keychain needed to happen. Didn't MobileMe subscribers have that functionality in the past? In any case it is most welcome news.

iCloud iWork sounds interesting... but what's really missing from iWork is document sharing along the lines of Dropbox or Google Drive, at least if it's supposed to be more than just a toy. I suppose that could be part of the updates, but I didn't see anything along those lines mentioned in Engadget's live blog. Even for home use, though - I occasionally want to share docume

Sure, so should iMessage, They promised FaceTime would be, iCloud, etc. That wouldn't lock you into Apple's devices. Never buy a device that has to try to force you to stay instead of making you *want* to stay.

The one thing apple did to screw up my workflow was getting rid of the key chain and disk on the online side. Everyone complained about the $100 a year for mac.com(I mean really, less that $10 bucks a month were enough to make everyone crazy, what freetards) but for me it meant my machines were interchangeable and a crash was not going to mean I lost anything important. icloud sucks in comparison and is not yet worth the money they want for it. It is really just a way to sell music.

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Um....Macs have supported multiple displays for something like 20 years. They've supported HDTVs since DVI-HDMI adapters were invented. The news here is that OSX Mavericks has significantly improved multi-monitor management, such as the ability to have a menu bar and dock on all screens simultaneously and new window grouping features.

I know it's hip to complain about how the editors can do basic fact checking, but this is ridiculous.

We waited a half hour after the end of the keynote for this terrible summary, really? Multiple-monitor support has been in the Mac OS since 1987; the summary doesn't make it even reportedly clear that today's announcement was about (much-needed, IMO) new features for said ability. And "including hdtvs"? Again, this has been possible since hdtvs came into existence (via hdmi out or div->hdmi adapters). The new feature here is being able to use an airplay-cable device as a secondary display.

We waited a half hour after the end of the keynote for this terrible summary, really? Multiple-monitor support has been in the Mac OS since 1987; the summary doesn't make it even reportedly clear that today's announcement was about (much-needed, IMO) new features for said ability. And "including hdtvs"? Again, this has been possible since hdtvs came into existence (via hdmi out or div->hdmi adapters). The new feature here is being able to use an airplay-cable device as a secondary display.

OS X has THE worst multi-monitor support in the industry. Without question. I actually broke down and sold my secondary display because it is next to worthless on a Mac. I like to run XCode in full-screen mode (more real estate for dual pane mode). The second monitor is literally just a gray colored paper weight in this mode. Do I really need to use my air-play compatible device as a second display? Not at all. It will still be useless to me.

That's something they fucked up a few years ago with OS X 10.7 and people have been howling about it ever since (and is exactly why I inserted the "(much-needed, IMO)" into my post). Nonetheless, that wasn't so much an issue of multi-monitor support as dumbass full-screen "feature" support; it could be mostly avoided by just maximizing your windows instead of using full-screen. The biggest issue with their multi-monitor support, IMO, was having the menu bar on only one screen. It's been that way forever and has always driven me crazy.

I'm glad to see they're finally fixing all of these issues - which is exactly why I was disappointed with the shitty summary saying "Macs will now support multiple displays, including HDTVs!"

which will unfortunately wipe the hard-disk reducing its usefulness significantly but the hipsters won't notice because it pretty.

on a different but related note what is with the general public conflating mac use with tech savvy? most mac users i know use it because they are to confused by windows so need a easier system. I know that not all are that way but that has just been my personal experience.

Mac Pro’s flash internal storage will offer an astoundingly fast 1.25GBps reads and 1.0GBps writes. That's great, but is this a sign of things to come? Like a Macbook Pro with PCIe flash? Oh, the possibilities...

I've been waiting for this event for weeks, as we're buying 90ish laptops for our school district... faculty use.

First thing I noticed was the MacBook Air update... and how they are surprisingly dropping the clock speed of existing systems in favor of battery life. While I know their new software may be more efficient, and even the chipset itself may be more efficient, it just surprised me. Being around for the grand ol days of the "great hardware race", I didn't think they would actually move backwards (from 1.8GHz to 1.3GHz). First thing I thought of was that they are doing this so that they can have the great hardware race again... and announce faster systems all over again for that lineup.

Next up, the Mac Pro looks like an homage paid to the G4 Cube. While I will admit owning one and thinking it was cool at the time, I think someone else pointed out here that the elegance is lost in the external cable mess. But let's be honest, the people who are being power users are already going for external enclosures for everything (especially storage) because it can be had faster and cheaper by going not Apple. To all those also who say "OMG you can't upgrade it", my experience has been those who buy Mac Pros work them hard and run them until they quit or completely replace them anyway. They want an all in one solution that they can use and replace as a whole... because they know about graphic design / video editing, and not necessarily about performance computing.

iOS7. Auto updating, super cool for what we do with 800 iPads sitting here. I like it, even though it seems to be more like the Android phone I tested for a week recently (Galaxy S4). I was really hoping that with the release of iOS7, they would have been releasing what I consider "a properly sized phone for 2013". They didn't. Le sad.

iCloud... platform agnostic document modification through a web browser, cool... but not when you start having to pay for an over X amount of storage every month. They are just trying to generate more recurring revenue. iCloud keychain seems like a terrible idea in terms of security. I say this because of the whole keys to the kingdom approach. All of my users use iCloud now, and they still are using sticky notes on their laptops, though I'm trying to break them of this.

Lastly, I am annoyed that none of this was even remotely ready to go today. I was hoping to be surprised with the release of software and that they had actually secretly worked with developers to have it out remotely soon. As a school, releasing iOS7 when school starts, well.. that's just a pain in the ass. Tim Cook is one of these most underwhelming speakers, and really just irritates me when I hear him. Whoever the dude in the blue shirt was... that guy was great with his speeches.

MacOS and iOS need to merge - We need to be able to use our data and our applications no matter what the hardware.

Apple should offer legacy support back to Classic, at least, with full 68K/PPC support - there's a tremendous amount of excellent software that was never brought to OSX or iOS. People using that software can't upgrade and abandon their data and applications so they don't. If Apple offered legacy support I have eleven machines I would upgrade and I know of many more people in the same boat. Since they won't support my data and apps I keep fixing old machines and Apple's not making profits on new hardware and OS updates from us.

Sorry, but there is nothing professional about the new Mac Pro. It is Eye Candy; nothing more. Its proprietary layout means that there is very little that will be upgradeable (save for maxing out its measly four RAM slots, or swapping out the SSD). CPU not fast enough anymore? Graphics cards out-of-date? Sorry, time to buy a new Mac Pro. But of course that is what Apple want. Heaven forbid that someone would actually want to upgrade their CPU or change to the latest generation GPU.

What is really anti-Professional about the Mac Pro? Dumping Internal storage bays and PCIe slots moving everything to external interfaces. SSDs have their place and so too do spinning disks. I could choose what I wanted, but with this new Mac Pro I have no choice. I would now have to have a stack of external drives sitting at my workstation. It won't look so pretty then.

On top of that, plenty of companies have invested in PCIe-based hardware (Audio DAW cards and HD-SDI interface cards are just two examples of many). Companies who have invested heavily in such hardware are now SOL. What will they do? Buy an overpriced Mac Pro and reinvest in all new Thunderbolt-based hardware (that most likely doesn't exist yet given the slow uptake of Thunderbolt), or switch to PC based hardware?

I have to look at the reason for the redesign, and it is very easy to see: Apple (and Intel) own Thunderbolt. They make a cut of every Thunderbolt device sold. Of course, they are going to push Thunderbolt over everything else. Did Apple actually listen to what their professional clients need?

I have to look at the reason for the redesign, and it is very easy to see: Apple (and Intel) own Thunderbolt. They make a cut of every Thunderbolt device sold. Of course, they are going to push Thunderbolt over everything else. Did Apple actually listen to what their professional clients need?

Er, what? Intel owns Thunderbolt. The only thing that Apple owned temporarily was the Thunderbolt trademark. That trademarks has since been assigned to Intel. Apple does own the connector: however is royalty free and part of the VESA spec.

On the contrary, Apple didn't really show anything very new here. Maybe the new Mac, but iOS 7 in particular is just an incremental upgrade with no big headline features like they have always had in the past.

Apple seems to have lost its spark, at a time when its rivals are releasing some really new and interesting stuff.

It's funny how people have this recollection of past Apple products being these dramatically original products. The only Apple product for which this could actually have been said to be the case was the original Mac (an even that is debatable). Every other major product was greeted at introduction with comments like "It's been done before," "a me-too product," "a niche product." And in the years between releases of new Apple product categories, there have always been numerous comments that to the effect tha